Alarmed

Easter 2009
(Mark’s empty tomb)


Expecting death, but finding life.

I opened the letter from a former life—my old Roman Catholic seminary in Chicago. The letter’s purpose was-can you guess?---asking for donations. Times are also tough for seminaries these days. I almost tossed the letter unopened into recycling, but I ripped it opened to see if there just might be something new.

One of my first New Testament profs is the Dean: Donald Senior—a great scholar and a good man. His line on the second page was worth the whole letter. Easter, says Don, is about “expecting death, but finding life.”

That’s just what happens in Mark’s Gospel. The women, much braver than the men, show up after the Sabbath to do the horribly real but loving thing—finish preparing the body of Jesus for the long slow sleep in the tomb, awaiting the resurrection of the just on the last day. They come expecting death. They can handle death. Instead, they find life. And they run because, as the Gospel bluntly says, “they were afraid.”

Maybe we think we’d know better if we were there that first Easter morning. But I doubt it. Resurrection and new life happens. And we’re still afraid.

We are afraid because of the price that love paid to free us. We live in an age which is commitment-phobic—we keep every possible option open, we look carefully for the escape clause, we search for the “reset” button. But the story of Easter is the story of God’s complete commitment to us through the blood of the Beloved. A done deal, once for all, and nothing is held back. From all time he pours himself out in death for us. And he suffers still in his beloved people, he is still crucified in us, said one early church thinker, and he is crucified as we speak in the poor of the earth and in the poor places of our own lives. We are never abandoned, we are never alone, we are never without hope. He is bonded to us by blood and passion and choice. If we are freaked out by commitment, we’d probably run from that empty tomb! The empty tomb speaks without words of God’s complete commitment to us.

And we would run because it is not just the crucified Jesus who is changed from death to life. Jesus is changed, and we are too.

Is there anything that feels old and dead in our lives? Is there anything that imprisons us, chains us from becoming who we are meant to be? We are meant to be the free children of a free God. We are meant to be love itself, life itself, joy and tears and delight all at once. We were made to be God’s strength and God’s power and God’s healing and God’s peace. And we can be all that this Easter! We are all in arrested development, but the power of the risen Christ sets us free to be who we are meant to be. The point is not to go to Mass this Easter to search for some peace. The point is to BE the Mass of Easter, to be celebration and Alleluia and bread blessed and broken and shared so that we all may have life!

We are here tonight, called together by the One who passed from death to life. We are together and we have been changed. If we want to run in fear from this church, then maybe you’ve heard the message of the empty tomb and you know what it might mean! But try sticking around, stick around while water is poured and the Spirit comes down and new life comes to Salvador in his Baptism and we all know once again who we are—beloved of a loving God, people of a Christ wholly committed to us, nothing held back. We are changed now and always into the people we are meant to be.